Cascading Drawers for the Shop

Until I go Active Duty with the Navy in a few more weeks I have had the opportunity to work as a carpenter for a Christian, youth outreach summer camp. Aside from the paid work, perhaps my favorite part of the job is the ability to use the wood shop in my off time. Since I am going Active Duty, my personal project list has dwindled because I don’t want to accumulate anything, so I’ve decided to donate my off time back into the organization by making things to better the wood shop I work in every day.

We have a Saw-Stop cabinet saw with the extension table and a router lift mounted in the extension. I wanted to build a convenient place to organize the router table tools and the Saw-Stop dado blades and accessories that was near the tool itself. I was very limited on space to do this, so I ended up building two shallower drawers, instead of one deep one.

This is my first time ever building drawers. I’ve built many things, including fine furniture, but I just have never had a request for anything with a drawer. This took me way longer than I expected, but honestly, considering my inexperience with drawers, I definitely didn’t design an easy one to start with, and I also wanted to do it right. I believe that what I build for the shop should be just as good as everything else I build.

These drawers are made of some 3/4” Oak ply and 1/2” Poplar ply we had laying around, and I used Hard Maple for the drawer slides. Everything is dado’d and screwed. The top drawer is custom fit for the dado stack, the dado zero-insert plate, and the bag containing the dado safety-brake and tools. The bottom drawer is currently just open, but I may go back and install dividers soon. Both drawers extend over 100% so that you can reach everything easily.

Overall I am very pleased with how this project turned out and I can’t wait to build some more drawers sometime. I’ll definitely be looking for cool ways to make more cascading drawers too. That was a fun engineering feat.

Thanks everyone for the comments! I have heard a few times about well-equiped, yet deserted, wood shops on many Navy bases. I hope I get the opportunity to use them. I am on a 6 year Nuke contract, and currently have a high interest in making a career out of it. I know I will be limited on time and probably not have a wood shop available to me in Nuke Power School for 18 months, but hopefully once I get assigned to a submarine I will be at a base with a wood shop.

You do know that even though you are going thru Nuke Power School , that the US Navy does indeed have Nuke Powered Ships that are NOT Designed to SINK. I spent 9 years in the Navy myself all on the Surface.